Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibit coming to AGO

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Making its only Canadian stop in a much-anticipated — and enormously popular — global tour, artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibit comes to Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in March. While the Japanese artist and writer’s new exhibit doesn’t open to the public until March 3 (running until May 27), anticipation for the exhibit has been frenzied, with long line-ups for Members’ tickets in advance of the first public sales on January 16.

Love Forever. Photo by Cathy Carver, via AGO

Anchoring the exhibit, six mirrored rooms are coming to the AGO. Each of the rooms will have a unique theme, while a complementary collection of smaller individual works — including paintings, sculptures, and drawings — will round out the exhibit. In addition, Infinity Mirrors will also feature the installation

All the Eternal Love I have for Pumpkins. Photo by Cathy Carver, via AGO

As Kusama’s official website explains, “Yayoi Kusama had a breakthrough in 1965 when she produced Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field. Using mirrors, she transformed the intense repetition of her earlier paintings and works on paper into a perceptual experience.”

Over the course of her career, the artist has produced more than twenty distinct Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the Hirshhorn’s exhibition—the first to focus on this pioneering body of work—is presenting six of them, the most ever shown together. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. The rooms also provide an opportunity to examine the artist’s central themes, such as the celebration of life and its aftermath.

By tracing the development of these iconic installations alongside a selection of her other key artworks, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors aims to reveal the significance of the Infinity Mirror Rooms amidst today’s renewed interest in experiential practices and virtual spaces.